I feel sick to my stomach

Maybe I should make this a regular category. It seems that increasing numbers of things have this effect on me these days.

I just read that city aldermen in Calgary, Canada received a 5% pay hike. No, that's not the sickening part, although it doesn't make the stomach feel great in these trying economic times. Apparently, some of the aldermen were campaigning to scrap the increase, rightfully citing hard times as the impetus for letting the city keep the money. After all, times are just as hard for city coffers as they are for Joe Citizen.

The part that makes me want to throw up is that some of the others sitting around the council table who happily accepted the raise, say that the members who were fighting the increase were merely "grandstanding". Nothing like accusing those who would do the right thing of just trying to make the rest look bad. In effect, the shameful trying to shame the righteous.

I can't remember how many times in my life I got the same treatment. Once, when I was not yet established in a career, I was working in a very large printing shop, at the bottom of the ladder. When someone from a press crew was absent, a worker from the next lower rung would fill in for him. In my case, I got to be "roll man".

That job required that you check approximately 1,000-pound rolls of paper for nicks, stripping the roll down to where it was "clean" and then using a crane to lift and set the roll on the press. You also set up the roll to be spliced with the preceding roll as it finished, so that the paper would feed continuously. If you screwed up in either of these functions, the press would come to a stop and precious time, paper and manpower were wasted in getting started again.

On a particularly bad week, production-wise, our foreman came to chew out our crew and one thing he said was that on the times that I was working as roll man, the production rate was higher and the wastage was lower. I should mention that this particular press had three crews that worked around the clock. Anyway, it didn't take more than a few minutes for the regular roll man from my crew to come to me and give me shit for making him look bad. What kind of twisted thinking is this?

Something else from that job sticks out in my mind. There were a few guys who sometimes as they were finishing their shift would say to me in a very proud manner as I was arriving for my shift "I just f____ed the dog all day". If you're unfamiliar with this expression, it means "did nothing".